A large fraction of the Internet ecosystem is funded by the desire to acquire customers. Merchants place advertisements in the hope of generating brand awareness, demand, and leads. Advertisement can be of varying efficiency and precision of targeting. In general, advertisements tend to be an expensive, indirect and expensive way of generating sales. Nevertheless, the presentation of advertisements is a large and explosively growing business.
Increasingly, consumers buy goods online by browsing online merchant sites and are often led to the merchant site via an advertisement. However, merchants face more difficulty in directly finding consumers that are interested in the merchants' products.